I am in the market for a new high-end Ubuntu laptop, and I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations.

My requirements are:

that it be crazy-fast (a quad-core i7 processor will do nicely)

excellent battery life under real usage (over 7 hours)

high-resolution screen (at least 1440x900)

Basically, I want the MacBook Pro, but with Ubuntu instead of OS X. I know I could just buy the MacBook Pro and install Ubuntu on it, but my understanding is that recent MacBook hardware is not well-supported under Ubuntu. Plus, I'd prefer not to pay a premium on Apple hardware.

Is there anything out there that can run Ubuntu well, and still compete with Apple on performance, battery life, and screen resolution?

Edit: Just to follow up, I ended up buying a Lenovo W520, which works great, except that for a long time the nVidia Optimus graphics were impossible to get working. Now they work quite well, but are still an ordeal to set up.

Complicating things is a BIOS bug that Lenovo refuses to acknowledge or fix. In the future, I'm going to stay away from nVidia graphics on laptops at all costs, and probably prefer other brands to Lenovo.

6 Answers
6

The System 76 Bonobo is probably your best bet. Not sure about battery life (I don't have one yet), but it will clip a MacBook anything at anything else :).

About battery life: just get the extra battery.
It is rather difficult to find any laptop that comes out the box with longer battery life. My HP dv7 (from 2008) came with about 3 hrs battery life at first, but I was able to find a 3rd party (not HP direct that is) battery with about 4 to 6 hours battery life (that was using KDE which allowed me to set power profiles; GNOME does not allow that so I would get a more average battery life of about 4 hrs.

If you want the power more than the battery life, then look no further - unless you want the ZaReason Chimera, which is quite the beast, but also quite expensive :).

Looks like a reasonable candidate. What kind of battery life are you getting? Also, how does the NVidia Optimus work under Ubuntu?
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jbeard4Nov 4 '11 at 3:50

Dont expect more than 2 hours battery life (With 6-cell battery, mine having Full HD screen with 2 GB Graphics and I dont expect anything more ;)). As far Nvidia Optimus is concerned, you can use Bumblebeelink
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NikhilNov 4 '11 at 4:03